Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

The changes to “dis/abled”1 scholarship and activism in the 1980s can be best understood as a shift from understanding disability as something that resides in the individual to viewing it as something imposed upon individuals by a society that does not accommodate their needs.

As described by critical race Theorists Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, Unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of con

Mary Poovey, a materialist feminist—a feminist who focuses primarily on how patriarchal and capitalist assumptions force women into socially constructed gender roles—described this clearly. Poovey was attracted to deconstructive techniques for their ability to undermine what she saw as socially constructed gender stereotypes (the belief that such s

Interacting with proponents of this view requires learning not just their language—which in itself is challenging enough—but also their customs and even their mythology of “systemic” and “structural” problems inherent in our society, systems, and institutions. As experienced travelers know, there’s more to communicating in a completely different cu

Foucault didn’t deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it.

Baudrillard described three levels of simulacra: associated with the premodern, modern, and postmodern. In premodern times—those before Enlightenment thought revolutionized our relationship to knowledge—he said, unique realities existed, and people attempted to represent them. In the modern period, this link broke down because items began to be mas

Crenshaw argues that (identity) categories “have meaning and consequences”;28 that is, they are objectively real. She distinguishes between a “black person” and a “person who happens to be black,”

Jacques Derrida, who, in 1967, published three texts—Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena—in which he introduced a concept that would become very influential in postmodernism: deconstruction. In these works, Derrida rejects the commonsense idea that words refer straightforwardly to things in the real world.34 Instead, h

Because liberalism sought to remove social expectations from identity categories—black people being expected to do menial jobs, women being expected to prioritize domestic and parenting roles, and so on—and make all rights, freedoms, and opportunities available to all people regardless of their identity, there was a strong focus on the individual a